Tag: media

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THIS WEEK: New research from the University of Ibadan 

In this session, speakers from the University of Ibadan will share research they’ve been conducting in Media and Cultural Studies.

1600-1730 Wednesday 18 April
P424, Parkside, Birmingham City University
Free registration at this link

Prof. Ayobami Ojebode (University of Ibadan) – Power to the Powerful, Not to the People: Explaining the Variation in Online Reactions to Chibok and Dapchi Schoolgirls’ Abductions in Nigeria

Prof. Nkechi M. Christopher (University of Ibadan) –  Assessing the influence of journalists’ role perception on the development of investigative journalism in Nigeria

Dr. Olusola O. Oyewo (University of Ibadan) – Teaching Business Journalism in the West African Sub- Region and its implication for uniformity/global standards

Dr. Beatrice A. Laninhun (University of Ibadan) – Exploring Advertising to Children across Cultures

Dr. Olayinka A. Egbokhare (University of Ibadan) – Analysing the Reportage of Yoruba News on Gender Based Violence – a study of selected Radio Stations in Ibadan. (Co Researcher- Abiola Odejide, PhD Emeritus Professor)

About the speakers:
Ayobami Ojebode is Professor of Applied Communication in the Department of Communication and Language Arts, University of Ibadan, Nigeria. His research interests are community communication; community governance; new media; and political communication. His works have been published in reputable outlets in many countries. Professor Ojebode has been a visiting researcher, a visiting scholar, a keynote speaker, a consultant, a trainer and/or examiner in universities and research institutes in Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany, Peru and the United States. Since 2014, he has been facilitating and coordinating advanced research methods workshops for researchers from all over Africa organised biannually by the Partnership for African Social Governance Research (PASGR) in Kenya. (ayo.ojebode@gmail.com)

Nkechi M. Christopher PhD, Department of Communication and Language Arts, University of Ibadan, Nigeria teaches, researches and supervises studies in Communication and Language Arts, and is a book publishing expert and a literacy development enthusiast. Internationally, she taught English for two sessions (2013–2015) in King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah (KSA), has presented papers at conferences and has published in reputable journals. Locally, she successfully initiated and coordinated a six-month synthetic phonics trial sponsored by THRASS UK (2009), organised the 1st Mid-term Conference of the Reading Association of Nigeria (RAN) in 2007, among other sponsored activities and events. She became a full professor of her university with effect from October 2014 by a February 2018 pronouncement. (nmxtopher@gmail.com)

Dr Oyewo holds a PhD in Organisational Communication with focus on the informal network of relationship, Rumour within the organisation. He has been a university teacher for the past 21 years teaching courses which include Introduction to Human Communication Systems, Business/Organisational Communication, Comparative Media Systems, Investigative journalism, group communication system etc. He is a member of the Forum of African Media Educators under the auspices of Konrad Adenauer Stiftung. He is also a Fellow of the Certified Institute of Marketing Communications in Nigeria. He is a consultant to various agencies including: UNICEF, Federal Ministries of Health, Information and Education. He is currently a Reader in the Department of Communication and Language Arts and has publications in reputable academic journals, both local and international. He has also supervised to completion, 8 PhD holders, and another two who are also at advanced stages in their research.

Beatrice Adeyinka Laninhun (PhD) teaches in the Department of Communication and Language Arts, University of Ibadan, Nigeria. Her teaching and research interests include marketing communications, speech communication, broadcast presentation and gender studies. She is a Fellow of the Certified Marketing Communications Institute of Nigeria, Member of the Nigerian Institute of Public Relations, associate registered practitioner in Advertising and Member, African Council for Communication Education, Nigeria Chapter, among others. She was a visiting scholar to CAMRI, University of Westminster, United Kingdom. She has published in reputable international journals including Legon Journal of the Humanities, Third Sector Review, and Postmodernism problems.

Olayinka Abimbola Egbokhare holds a B.A., M.A., and Ph.D in Communication and Language Arts University of Ibadan. She teaches and conducts research in Gender Studies, Marketing Communications, Health Advocacy and Promotions. She is the author of Dazzling Mirage, a novel which has been adapted for the big screen. She is presently on the Commonwealth Rutherford Fellowship at the Warwick Medical School, University of Warwick. She uses her creative writing skills for message development for Mental Health, Maternal Health and Preventing Mother to Child Transmission of HIV. She also works with Youths and partners with different organizations on issues relating to young people. She speaks in schools and public fora on literacy, health promotions and gender sensitization (especially the prevention of gender- based violence). As a gender focal person for University of Ibadan, she was on the team that developed the institutions’ Gender Policy and Sexual Harassment Policy.

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SEMINAR SERIES: Dima Saber on ‘Resistance-by-Recording’ part 1

Dima presented her talk as part of the Seminar Series. You can find part 2 here and part 3 here. 

Resistance-by-Recording: The disappearing archives of the Syrian war 

by Dima Saber

The overall aim of this project is to explore the successes and potentialities as well as limitations and challenges that camera-related practices bring to the objectives of contemporary protest movements across the Arab world.  We’re looking at 4 main countries of focus Egypt, Palestine, Syria and Yemen.

The project advances a media-practice based approach – with ethnographic field studies – in order to explore and theorize how variously situated activists creatively and strategically use digitally networked cameras and images to address local concerns – within the boundaries of existing media ecologies that offer different opportunities and constraints in each particular setting. Each context generates specific needs, and local actors will modify and renew their image-making strategies to address these shifting needs.

Activists not only use cameras to speak truth to power, but to realize or produce themselves as political subjects and negotiate exactly what such a subjectivity may be and can do.  In thus re-centring the agency of human beings over technologies, a critical purpose of the project is also to explore the meanings that practices of creating, distributing, editing, sharing, viewing and archiving images acquire for differently located participants.  This is to say that the project attends to political image production also as subjective, embodied and performative practice.

How do you create an image that is not pre-defined by official imagery? I want to explore Arab-image activism as counter-images – as a response to the complete suffocating and constraining aspect of existing images as depicted through the Western neo-colonial stereotyping gaze, and/or through regime-controlled imagery. At the same time I want to question the assumption that grassroots practices would produce a different, new, original, more authentic images of Arab revolt, war, conflict, etc.

I want to ask:

  1. What drives people to risk everything to create and mobilize rebellious images? What are their motivations, hopes, desires, lived experiences, affects, then and now?
  2. To what extent, and in what particular ways, are the planning, publicizing and performance of political actions dependent on – both shaped by, and shaping – practices of image making? (How camera-based strategies and tactics are mutually shaping of activists’ larger routines and repertoires of defiance)
  3. What are the various considerations do activists/archivists articulate about how images are made, and why; about how they are delivered, displayed and re-purposed? About their intended audience(s)? What kinds of political outcome do they hope for vs. what they hoped to achieve back then when they were documenting the uprisings as they were happening, and how do they see the value of their archives and images today, seven years into the uprising.
  4. What are the main obstacles and limitations they are facing, such as lack of cultural translation and resonance, over-reliance on corporate platforms, the precariousness of the digital
  5. How do activist camera-mediated practices in the Arab world help organize new formations of political connectivity within, across and beyond the region?  How are people connected – or not? How do they work together – or not? I’m interested here in exploring the economy and politics of collaboration.
  6. What are the ethical aspects of creating distributing, displaying and archiving this imagery? Looking for example at Western institutions’ codified ethical guidelines (news industry! BBC, Al Jazeera etc.) vs. how the activists organise themselves: their own sense of ethics?
  7. What are the various forms of connections and circulation between specific geographical places and online spaces? How, precisely, are online and offline activities important to each other?

Continue to part 2 here.

Dima is Senior Researcher and Lecturer at the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research.